August 18

The Soul Evolves

The human soul is not the procession of any single individual; it is the ground of awareness that is the essence of the entire human experience. It is a field of pure knowing. At least that is what Ralph Waldo Emerson learned from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson used the term the Over-Soul to express this foundational consciousness that is the source of human awareness. In his own writing Emerson is true to the spirit of Coleridge’s vision of Reason.


Emerson is describing a non-dual intelligence. Pure knowing in which seeing and seen, subject and object are one and the same. And he directly borrows from Coleridge when he writes, “We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation.”

Emerson’s spiritual teaching he called Self-Reliance and the Self that he taught us to rely upon was not the ego or personality, but the big “S” Self or the Over-Soul. According to Emerson surrender to this deeper self is the birth of true human greatness and virtue.


There is something else that I find in Emerson’s writing, something I do not seem to find in Coleridge’s magnificent book Aids to Reflection. In the line, “The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her.” Emerson implies that the soul is not merely the passive source of human knowledge, but a forward moving, world building force in the universe. In another passage Emerson describes how the soul advances.


The advances of the Over-Soul as described by Emerson seem very similar to more modern ideas of evolution. Evolution does not take place linearly from one individual to the next. We mark the progress of evolution by leaps from one species to the next, or in the case of cultural evolution from one stage of culture to the next.

The soul is the field of pure knowing that is the foundation of human consciousness. Or, from my last post, the light spreading out in all directions prior to any being reflected back to be seen. It is pure intelligence without any object yet known. Emerson’s implication is that this pure knowing is evolving. The foundational intelligence of the universe is growing and evidence of that growth can be seen in the progress of evolution in the physical and living world. The soul evolves.